Many modern appliances, consumer devices, and other devices include embedded systems that are configured to perform one or more dedicated functions. However, most embedded systems of such devices do not include network connectivity, role based access control capabilities, remote interface capabilities, remote control capabilities, or related capabilities. Designing such functionality into an embedded system, designing application programming interfaces (APIs) for accessing such functionality, designing web services capable of communicating with and controlling the embedded system via this added functionality, and designing applications for taking advantage of this functionality can consume considerable resources of the device manufacturer.
Moreover, a growing number of traditionally dumb and smaller devices have been equipped with network connectivity using simple embedded systems that lack computing resources to perform local processing beyond a dedicated function. Absent network connectivity, such devices are unable to receive instruction. Accordingly, some utility of such devices may be lost when network connectivity is limited or unavailable.